"Lay that Trumpet in Our Hands" by Susan Carol McCarthy, Chapter 26–Revelations

So far, my elite corps of crackerjack agents have produced precious little evidence, and not a lot of suspects.

But as the days drag by, as the date Marvin died comes and goes with no hint of resolution, the nightmare I thought I’d outgrown returns.

I anticipate a fair amount of action in the next couple weeks.

Attorney General has agreed to convene a Grand Jury in Miami the first week of April.

The subpoenas are already typed, and we’re set to deliver them on Monday.

It was Armetta who invited the Moores into The Quarters and helped them register eligible adults to vote.

"Waitin’s hard work, unless you have comp’ny to distract you.”

Her comment conjures up something Luther told Daddy the night Marvin was missing.

“Matter of fact, a bunch of us get together fairly reg’lar, not to dwell on what we lost, mind you."

The flyer cites Ike’s record as “an enforcer of racial segregation in the U.S. armed forces,” his “opposition to civil rights legislation,” and his “support of immigration laws which bar Colored Races from entering the country.”

The Saturday morning after Daddy and Robert went into the Klan fishing camp, Ren (who knew nothing about their efforts) did the second most foolhardy thing of his life.

Somehow, Ren twisted that into believing he was anonymous or, worse yet, invisible.

My classmates, several of them related to the Klansmen now in Miami, appear well versed in the differences between state crimes (robbery, assault and battery, murder) and federal ones (the infringement of someone’s Constitutional rights).

Her call to Emmett Casselton included a strident retelling of every word Mr. Reed had said, followed by fifteen minutes of frantic pacing and chain-smoking, waiting for the return call.

Why is it, in this whole mess, ever since Marvin, innocent people are the only ones suffering?

My parents, knowing the small Opalakee Presbyterian Church will be packed with wary Klansmen and their heartsick wives, send flowers but elect not to attend.

Backed into the corner of perjury versus self-preservation, how long before these human snakes bare their fangs at each other?

Personally, I think Kefauver’s got a better chance of beatin’ that warmonger Eisenhower in the fall.

Despite the fact that their man lost, Daddy and Luther are jubilant.

“Governor Warren promised Kefauver a humiliating defeat,” Daddy explains.

A federal grand jury Wednesday submitted “a catalog of terror that seems incredible” in a report of Ku Klux Klan activities that ran the gamut from murder and arson to beatings and bombings.

These are only some of the acts attributed to the KKK by the jury in its roundup of terrorism dating from 1943.

Only those acts to which one or more Klansmen admitted participation were attributed to the KKK by the jury as it recited a long list of unbridled acts of violence in Greater Miami and central Florida.

Their statement indicated that the jury expects to return indictments when it reconvenes.

The jury said the Central Florida klaverns were “known to have a malevolent interest in Moore.”

Your tried and true friend, Reesa here’s just no describing the infinite difference between everyday life lived unawares and the agony of keeping watch for strange men who want to hunt and hurt your father.

They were charged with lying under oath when they denied to the grand jury that they were members of the Ku Klux Klan, or that they took part in a series of violent acts in Central Florida from 1949 to 1952.

I want to rage, but the truth hits me, Buddy was not their intended target.

“In case your Southern gentleman turns out to be a scalawag,” she shoots back.

In December 1953, the judge granted their motion to quash the indictments because, he said, “the Federal Grand Jury has no jurisdiction to investigate the acts about which the suspects allegedly lied.”

Some people said the Klan disbanded because of Emmett Casselton’s say-so.

“No more late-night meetings at the fishing camp,” “no more political rallies downtown,” “no more white robes in and out of the dry cleaners,” the women told their men, eager to shore up what little social equity remained in the fine old names that had been “dragged through the mud.”

Told him if the Klan harmed so much as another hair on your brother’s head, or anyone else’s for that matter, she’d report certain rather large discrepancies in Casbah Groves’ Railway Express waybills to the I.R.S.!

After nearly sixteen months of having to hover near their houses since Marvin’s death, they relished their restored freedoms.

One day, Daddy and I were out riding in his pickup truck, the name of our family business brightly emblazoned on both sides.

It was, for me, an homage to the exceptional dignity and grace of my heart’s first and unforgettable best friend.

The assassination of Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore in Florida, four years before the Montgomery bus boycott, twelve years before Medgar Evers’ murder in Mississippi and seventeen years before the killing of Martin Luther King in Memphis, made them America’s first Civil Rights leaders to fall in the contemporary fight for equality.

Although the files clearly reference the Ku Klux Klan materials which my father, teen-aged “Robert” and clever old “Luther” liberated from the fishing camp, and which eagle-eyed “Armetta” helped identify, there is no mention of their names or of the secret circle of maids who, in a mutual, miraculous leap of faith, brought the walls of the “Opalakee” Klan tumbling down.

The investigation, led by the Attorney General’s Office of Civil Rights in conjunction with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), points to extensive circumstantial evidence that the Moores were victims of a conspiracy by exceedingly violent members of a Central Florida Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan.

Others, closer to the case than I, have questioned Crist's motive and political timing—he was, after all, running for governor—and called his investigation "deeply flawed."